The existing differences in languages and cultures are more and more perceived not as God’s “judgment” to prevent the completion of the Tower of Babel for the glorification of man by confounding languages, impeding their understanding and breaking the unity of the race, but rather as a “blessing” of cultural diversity which can prevent a depersonalizing homogenization of people, and which can also help to forestall their subjugation to totalitarian and imperialist projects. Cultural diversity contains a rich potential and opens new opportunities for the creative self-expression of individuals and for an interactive development of cultures and human liberation.
The cultural identity issue came to the forefront of social consciousness during the second half of the 20th century, and manifested itself in the movements for cultural diversity. The interest in cultural identification showed its positive impact in helping individuals regain the cultural dimensions of their personalities, and in uniting people in their cultural-spiritual resistance to the depersonalizing influence of socio-economic-political systems. But cultural identity is also used as an ideological weapon in political power-games under the banners of nationalism, racism, and religious fundamentalism.
Freedom of cultural self-identification presupposes a responsibility for respecting the same freedom of others, and thus promoting mutually beneficial intercultural relations through dialogue. Otherwise, the continuation of historical patterns of “cultural wars” and “clashes of civilizations” will be even more devastating in the globalized world, unless mutually respectful dialogical interrelations among culturally diverse people prevail.
Intercultural Transformation of Philosophy
In the Americas, issues of identity and intercultural relations are addressed by Latin American, African-Caribbean, and African-American philosophies. These philosophies, as well as African and other “Third World philosophies” are the original phenomena of contemporary philosophical thought. Of note are certain affinities and parallels in their development. They emerged in the form of the philosophical self-consciousness of ex-colonial nations, challenging Eurocentrism and striving for the creation of their own thought in order to help their quest for cultural identity and independent socio-cultural development. In the search for their originality or “authenticity” they turned their focus to national culture. However, an emphasis on cultural originality, if exaggerated, or not balanced by any recognition of others, can lead to extreme nationalism and ethnocentrism (many centers pretending to be universal).
These philosophies, striving for development and recognition, face a twofold task: on the one hand, they challenge the Western-centrism and, in the search for their originality or “authenticity”, turn their focus onto their own cultural traditions. On the other hand, their further development requires them to interrelate with other philosophical traditions and to elaborate the intercultural dimensions. In the historical development of these philosophies, they show the tendency to evolve from ethnocentrism to more openness to the ideas of cultural diversity and intercultural dialogue. The struggle between the “centrist” tendency and dialogical, intercultural tendency is present in today’s philosophy.
The idea of interrelations and dialogue among diverse cultures is articulated in the concept of interculturality. The recently emerged term intercultural philosophy refers to both: a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of intercultural relations and a view of philosophy itself from an intercultural perspective. Intercultural philosophy reflects on the impact of the cultural framework on philosophy as such, exploring the “fundamental differences of cultural coinages in the forms of thinking itself”. There are two main models of intercultural philosophy: one is the “interreligious-intercultural” paradigm represented by Raimon Panikkar, who argues the necessity of dialogical interrelations among various cultures as a necessary condition for the solution of the problems of the contemporary world. The other is the “liberational-intercultural” paradigm developed by Raúl Fornet-Betancourt. He views philosophy as culturally embedded and elaborates a project of “the intercultural trans-formation of philosophy”.
The emerging intercultural philosophy draws our attention to the cultural embedding of philosophical thinking. A philosophy, which accepts intercultural dialogue as a context of its reflection, enters into the process of transformation, which requires it to reconstruct its history, its methods and forms of articulation. R. Fornet-Betancourt asserts the necessity of reviewing the Eurocentric philosophical historiography and, based on the reconstruction of the history of ideas in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, of creating a new view of the history of philosophy. He criticizes claims of any philosophy to universality. The universalistic pretensions of European ethnocentrism was a type of self-proclaimed universality. As Fornet-Betancourt writes, “In this sense, the criticism is perfectly applicable to any other type of universality—whether African, Asian or Latin American—which would be the result of a monocultural proclamation”. He views intercultural communication as a possible means to transition from abstract universality to concrete and historical universalities. Intercultural dialogue creates conditions which allow a philosophy to reach a genuine universality, because it is arising from shared communication between the different cultural universes of Humanity.
From Multiculturalism to Dialogue of Cultures
During the last decades, the claim for recognition of diversity in gender, race, ethnicity and plurality of cultures has been expressed in the idea of multiculturalism. Frequently, however, merely lip service is given to multiculturalism: the other’s “right to exist” is acknowledged, while considering one’s own culture or truth superior or absolute. One can also simply ignore the other culture, and, in this case, different cultures are perceived as isolated and self-sufficient entities. Multiculturalism promotes a plurality of diverse cultures, highlighting their originality and sovereignty, but it is limited by overlooking the interrelations of cultures.
Postmodern philosophy contributed to an isolationist view of cultures. Its interpretation of plurality overemphasized difference and diversity while underestimating sameness and unity. The hallmarks of this philosophy were Jacques Derrida’s notions of “difference” and “deconstruction”, Jean-François Lyotard’s “incommensurability”, and Michel Foucault’s “genealogical” approach showing the essential connection of knowledge and power—all pointing towards contrasts and the conflict of opposites, allegedly determined by the nature of language and culture and by their function as tools of power struggles. Postmodern relativism challenges the idea of universal human values and truths, and thus questions the possibility of a common ground for dialogical interrelations among people and cultures.
The necessity to overcome the limitations of multiculturalism led to the development of new concepts which go beyond a fragmented plurality towards a comprehensive view of the dynamic processes of cultural interrelations. This new approach is conceptualized in notions of interculturality and transculture. They express the higher level of relations to others and their cultures, which accepts pluralism as a norm of life and the recognition of others as equals, and asserts a reciprocal understanding, dialogue, and collaboration.
Cultures in their interrelations have a common ground in universal human values. The homogenizing effects of globalization and, as a reaction to it, the growing interest in cultural identity, as well as the need for “universal references”, involve the problem of the universal and its relation to the particular, different, and local. In some interpretations of culture, universality is sharply opposed to particularity: cultures are viewed as contrast-centered and boundary maintaining, therefore ignoring their interrelations. In contrast to the relativist negation of universality, there is a strong voice of those who claim the validity of universalistic concepts and their increasing importance for understanding of today’s world and its humanization. They emphasize the unifying role of culture as a source of values which are shared by people, thus consolidating them ethnically, socially, nationally, and internationally.
Critical Universalism and Transculture
Mikhail Epstein, in his cultural studies, shows the striking parallels between some of the ideological movements in Russia before the Bolshevik revolution and in today’s United States. Among the factors which led to the Bolshevik revolution were the increasing polarization of society and the ideological climate characterized by socio-economic determinism in views of the culture as opposed to the independence of spiritual-intellectual values, and by the spread of the populist ideology of “militant materialism” and “class struggle”.
In the contemporary US, the polarization of society, which mirrors the polarizing processes in the world, is reflected in the shift in social consciousness and in intellectual climate. As M. Epstein notices, during the last decade even among the finest American intellectuals it is fashionable to be ideologically engaged with race, ethnic or gender issues. They view race, ethnicity and gender as factors which determine the ideology of an author or text.
Indeed, the postmodern critique contributed to unmasking the relations of knowledge and power, the ideological meta-narratives, the coercive use of language, religion and cultural symbols, as well as other methods of control and manipulation of people’s consciousness. However the weakness of this critique is in being limited to the diagnoses of existing political ideology and practice, without having either a comprehensive view of the whole system from the broader cultural-anthropological perspective or an alternative oriented towards universal human values and the genuine role of culture. This deterministic picture reinforces the fears that “the age of Big Brother has arrived”. In facing the neo-totalitarian trends, it is important for philosophy to remind individuals of human freedom and dignity and of their role as the subjects of cultural-historical creativity.
M. Epstein criticizes the postmodern relativism which challenges universal human values. The postmodern skepticism regarding universal concepts and values, and the reduction of philosophy and science to mere “social construction” used for political domination (J-F. Lyotard, M. Foucault, M. Nussbaum) makes postmodern philosophy a victim of its own reductionism (a kind of theoretical suicide). Epstein notes the paradox that “the critique of power from the perspective of the racial, ethnic, gender or political identities undermines the value-based grounds of the critique itself”.
In analyzing the postmodern theories of culture, M. Epstein points out an internal tension between multiculturalism and deconstruction. Multiculturalism implies an essentialist connection between cultural production and ethnic and physical origin, which is reflected in the definitions of multiple cultures as “white male” culture, “black female” culture, “homosexual” culture, etc. He considers it “a reverse form of determination”. A reduction of culture to physical origin obfuscates the difference between culture and nature. Epstein responds to J-F. Lyotard’s relativistic negation of “totality” and of “nostalgia about unity”. The author points out that overemphasis on “sovereignty” of “self-sufficient” cultures and religions, in its fundamentalist setting, has led to a “clash of civilizations” and currently a new world war. Thus today’s motto is: “We have paid a heavy price for nostalgia about [cultural] fragmentation and splintering. We will not permit ourselves to be blown up”.
M. Epstein develops the idea of universality in its renovated form of “critical universalism”. It is critical first of all of the obsolete, noncritical and dogmatic conceptions of universality ( like “Eurocentrism”, “rationalism”, etc. ). In contrast to uncritical universality, the new concept does not pretend to limit itself by a set of definitions, but rather it is anti-dogmatic and in principle open to what is “not”, “beyond” and “outside”, and in this sense it is apophatic. This means “universal understanding of universality itself”. Unlike the universalistic pretensions of European and other cultures (a parochial universality), this new universality is “humble” and critical to the time and locus of its claims on truth. Critical universality does not prescribe any preestablished value system or canon, identified with a certain culture. Rather it articulates a critical philosophical-methodological approach at the heart of which is an “outsidedness” (M. Bakhtin) and the critical distancing in relation to any existing cultures, including one’s native culture. This new concept, being radically critical, is nevertheless “universality, which possesses its own special creative potential, transcending cultural borders and creating new transcultural values and works”.
Based on the idea of critical universality, M. Epstein develops his concept of “transculture”. He defines transculture as “an open system of symbolic alternatives to existing cultures and their established sign systems”. This concept implies a transformation of existing cultures as a way of human liberation. While culture releases humans from many physical restrictions of nature, at the same time it imposes new limitations, of symbolic order, related to social, ethnic, racial, or sexual determinants. Transculture is viewed as a path of liberation from the determinations of culture itself, from the “prison house of language” and the variety of self-imposed cultural identities. It transcends the boundaries of “native cultures”, thus liberating us from “those symbolic dependencies, ideological addictions, patriotic infatuations that belong to us as members of a certain cultural group”. Transculture emphasizes the freedom of creativity, and it “builds new identities in the zone of fuzziness and interference and challenges the metaphysics of discreteness so characteristic of nations, races, professions, and other established cultural configurations that are solidified rather that dispersed by the multiculturalist ‘politics of identity’ .”
This universal perspective orients each culture and social-historical community towards becoming self-conscious of their own limitations and transcending them. For multiculturalism, each culture is perfect in its own way, as a self-enclosed and self-sufficient entity; whereas for transculture, each culture has some basic incompleteness and, therefore, needs the interrelationship. Every culture, asserts the author, has a great potential, which can be realized only if it transcends its borders and is engaged in dialogue with other cultures. The critical self-consciousness and willingness to overcome the separating boundaries of differences and the openness of cultures to interrelations can lead to their mutual “interference” and to new unities. In contrast to the extremes of classical sameness or postmodern differences of reasons, critical universality opens “a new stage: the creation of the new, trans-rational and trans-cultural unities based on the self-criticism of reasons and cultures and on understanding the limitations of each of them”.
Critical universality sheds a new light on the diversity issue. M. Epstein indicates the difference between the homogenizing notion “general” which refers to the common property of many objects (one-dimensional sameness), and the inclusive notion “universal” which means many qualities inherent to one thing (internal diversity or multidimensionality). If multiculturalism recognizes plurality merely formally, as an abstraction, without any qualitative criteria for comparison and evaluation of diverse cultures, critical universality orients us towards the whole picture and approaches different cultures as interrelated integral parts of the comprehensive human culture; thus each culture can be viewed and evaluated by its relation to this diverse universality. No one particular culture has a monopoly on criteria for evaluating any other culture (an aberration of the Eurocentric view of the cultures of colonized countries), but rather each of them faces the universality. The culture which is more open to the values of other cultures and thus “more universal” is more advanced than cultures which are closed and impenetrable to the values of other cultures. In other words, “the universalistic evaluation of cultures is based on the criteria of their own universality, their internal inclusiveness and external openness, richness, variety, dynamic tensions, complexities, paradoxes”. In the light of critical universality, we can view diversity not as mere plurality of isolated entities, but rather as various components of a comprehensive totality, or different manifestations of human cultural creativity. This resonates with the idea of “unity in diversity”.
In the Globally Interdependent World We Can Survive or Perish ---Together
If people are oblivious to the universal human values of culture, which keep it above the conflict of self-serving interests and power struggles, then the culture can lose what is properly cultural in culture. In the Western world, during the last decades of celebrating diversity, however, the cultural self-consciousness did not take root deeply enough in the universal values of human culture to be able to resist its subalternation to politics. The minority cultures issue became politicized and used as an ideological vehicle for the socio-political claims of ethnic, racial, and gender groups. But fragmented and juxtaposed movements are an easy target to be swallowed by Big Politics.
If people and cultures are not united by joint efforts to ensure conditions for peace and prosperity in their own societies and in the world, they are most likely to become trapped by war. Culture was one of the victims of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attack in New York and Washington, which was followed by the declaration of the global war on terrorism. “Might makes right.” Nowadays, the theme of multiculturalism has become overshadowed by suspicion of “the others”. The differences in cultures and religions, interpreted in a fundamentalist manner in terms of a “holy war” or “cultural wars” are used as an ideological justification for the politics of war. It demands that individuals become mobilized and to sacrifice their civil liberties, economic well-being, and even lives. A vicious circle of confrontation takes the lives of real people. The death of every person in the war, regardless of nationality or religion, diminishes us all and is a “tolling bell” reminding us of the universal value of human life. Moreover, in our globally interdependent world, full of weapons of mass destruction, the use of war as a means to pursue political goals threatens the survival of humanity. The politics of confrontation aggravates the fragility of contemporary world suffering from ecological deterioration, cultural homogenisation, and anthropological crisis.
In today's complex power structures, the demarcation between the dominating and dominated, between the self-serving ruling elites and the interests of the people, between the “haves” and “have nots”— crosses racial, ethnic, and national boundaries. The dominated majority of society, which includes people of different races, gender, ethnicity and religions, has a basic common interest in protecting their freedom and economic well-being. However, it frequently has fallen prey to the domination policy of “divide and conquer”. Conversely, the historical achievements in human liberation – from slavery, exploitation, racial and other discrimination – were result of people’s solidarity and grass-roots movements for social equality, justice, and civil rights. The broad anti-war, ecological, cultural, and democratic movements of the previous decades resulted in the end of the Cold War, opening the possibility for democratisation of society and of international relations. Unfortunately, this unique historical chance was missed. People seduced by nationalism and chauvinism are in danger of losing their civil liberties and democracy. A society fragmented into conflicting minorities is likely to become a hostage of a self-proclaimed “moral majority” and forced to rally around a totalitarian agenda by the politics of war.
For people in every society and across all nations, who resist the excessive control of the powers that be and who strive for freedom, human rights and basic socio-economic interests, it is vitally important to preserve a common ground for a uniting dialogue rather than to divide themselves racially, religiously or culturally. The aggravation of global problems such as the ecological crisis, wars in a thermonuclear age, and of the underdevelopment of the Third World, which are threatening the survival of humanity, shows the vital necessity of a dialogue and a joint effort for a solution to problems.
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* This essay is an excerpt from Edward Demenchonok’s article “Intercultural Discourse and African-Caribbean Philosophy” published in the journal Dialogue and Universalism No.1-2/2005. Courtesy of the author.
Edward Demenchonok is a philosopher and educator. He is listed in Who’s Who in the World and 2000 Outstanding Scholars of the 21st Century, and is a recipient of the Twenty-First Century Award for Achievement in Philosophy from the International Biographical Centre, Cambridge, England. He is the author of numerous books and professional journal articles, mainly in the fields of the philosophy of culture, social philosophy, and ethics.
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